


Up in the Air

by Longrose



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anger, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Family Feels, Feelings, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Loneliness, Loss, Magical Realism, Mentions of Cancer, Other, POV First Person, References to Depression, Sad with a Happy Ending, Short One Shot, Short Story, Slice of Life, Surreal, Urban Fantasy, contemporary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:28:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28861074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Longrose/pseuds/Longrose
Summary: Samuel is left reeling after receiving bad news about his father. He goes to the beach to clear his head and discovers that something entirely strange has happened.





	Up in the Air

I often go to the beach when I’m angry. Every visit to the beach calms me without fail, no matter the weather. Sometimes the waves are placid, their stillness smoothing the edges of my emotions as they do to the sea stones; sometimes the waves are tempestuous, whipped up by the wind into a heaving mass of dark grey vivacity that distracts me with each mesmerising crash upon the rocks. Sometimes, I need only look to the far horizon and let that reminder of my own insignificant place in the world reduce my troubles to manageable nubs in my mind. This technique often worked for my lesser struggles.

The anger I felt now was far from lesser.

I had scuffed my way towards the beach, hands thrust deep into my pockets, while ruminating on the news my dad had delivered last night. The road had been empty, for it was early; the wind was chill and the sky was caught between day and night, serene. I had expected the beach to be likewise empty and quiet. The furore I found was quite the opposite.

The esplanade street was lined with the shopkeepers who rose early to tend to their seaside market. When they should be unlocking the cages that fronted the shops, sweeping the errant sand from their doorstep and readying their displays for a day of commerce, they instead were standing flummoxed all along the street, hands on hips and calling to their neighbours. It was obvious why. The long street was littered with what looked like amorphous grey-blue blobs. The alien sight made me falter and forget my woes, even if just for a moment. I strode further into the street and saw the full panorama of the beach: I saw the full length of the esplanade as it stretched from the golf course to the seaside flats, and I saw the beach itself, sand grey in the autumnal morning. Wherever I looked there was a minefield of the glistening things. My eyes were heavy and dry from several restless nights, and the effort it took to make them focus on the scene before me was surprising. Finally, I saw them for what they were: they were jellyfish.

I approached the closest shopkeeper. He was a man who appeared to be fighting dotage with all his might. A thick beard hid his neck and an equally thick thatch of silver hair mushroomed around his face from beneath a red cap. He was busy removing a jellyfish from outside his shop. The offending jellyfish rolled and slopped with each scrape of the man’s broom. It neared the side and then dropped. Gone. This task done, the man wielded the broom like a staff and looked out over the length of road festooned with the creatures. His shoulders sagged.

‘Hey,’ I greeted him. ‘What happened here?’

He peered over his aquiline nose. ‘S’it not obvious? There’s jellyfish all along the bloody street!’

‘Yeah, I see that. How did they get there?’

The man clutched his broom and shrugged. ‘Only reason I could think of was a big wave carried them up. But nothing’s knocked over, see?’ He pointed at the bins and shop signs that still stood proud along the pavement. ‘So I don’t know how they got there. How d’you think they got there?’

I found that I simply did not care. I asked the only thing that mattered to me: ‘Is the beach still open?’

‘I guess so. You’re not thinking of going on the beach, are you? Are you dumb?’

‘Yeah. Thanks.’

I turned from the shopkeeper to let him return to his cleansing of the street. I heard him yell after me. ‘Be careful, laddie. You get stung by a jellyfish, it won’t be me pissing on it.’

I descended the ramp of black granite that led from the esplanade down to the beach. It looked as if the stretch of sand was studded with unpolished pearls. The sand was spongy from the recent rainfall, and it squashed out from beneath my feet as I wound my way through the many beached jellyfish. I paused to look at one. The fat bell of the jellyfish head was almost diaphanous, the once water-slick skin rendered a dry matte by the wind and sand. The pathetic tentacles poked out from beneath it. I snorted with disdain and went to move on before doing a double take; behind the jellyfish were slight divots in the sand, a line of them. I would never have noticed if the sand had not been damp with rain. Each divot was roughly of a size, commensurate with the jellyfish. I cocked my head at it.

The sea called to me, a restless counterpart to the blank sand on which I stood. The desire to go and watch it in the hopes of kindling some sense of peace in me was stronger than fleeting curiosity over a stationary creature. I paced over to the expanse, stopping just at the line where the swash petered out and was dragged moaning back. The sharp smell of salt. The boom and susurrus of the waves. I took it all in and thought about my plight.

Dad had phoned me a couple of nights ago. He usually texted. To see his contact picture on my vibrating screen had filled me with an inexplicable sense of dread, and I had hesitated before answering. My foreboding had been right. With words coarse and rigid, Dad had delivered the news that his cancer had returned with a heartless vengeance. I had wanted to beg him to stop when he had outlined his situation with resigned finality; each mention of metastasis and chemotherapy had been a hammer to my chest. But I let him talk it through. His voice had been thick with grief, but he did not cry. I was not so reserved.

I pulled out a pack of cigarettes, the box softened by constant battering in my pocket, and lit one. I knew it was a terrible habit, one born from a teenager’s desire to dull their frustrations without quite knowing how. I had been smoking more of late. The stresses had piled up in a brutal collaboration: my dissertation deadline loomed, my relationships with others were foundering, and now this. I took a slow drag, one that would have left teenage me wheezing.

What was I doing? I stared at the cigarette, the lit end winking evilly at me. Dad had lung cancer that had invaded from his colon, and here I was smoking. I was disgusting. Not wanting to litter the beach, I strode over to one of the groynes that ribbed the beach and stubbed out the cigarette on the spalted wood before slipping it back into the box.

There was a wet slap from behind me. I spun. A jellyfish was perched on the sand at my feet where there definitely had not been one before. Had it come from the sea? I stared out over the waves and for the first time saw the sheer number of jellyfish that bobbed and dipped before me. As I watched, another bellying wave swept up the beach and deposited more of the things on the wet sand. This was too confusing; I would find no solace here. I stormed my way back to the ramp that led up to the esplanade, not caring about the clumps of sand that clung to my shoes and legs. As I swept past the jellyfish I had inspected earlier, I saw it move from the corner of my eye. It took me a few steps to realise what I had seen and stare back, but there it lay still, sprawled uselessly on the sand. Too confusing. I left the beach.

I seethed and worried in equal measure. Seethed, because my attempt to soothe myself had been foiled. Worried, because I had no idea what I would do now to cope. Frustration washed over me as I turned over Dad’s fate in my mind, turned it over and over like an anxious child would turn an object in their hands. Dad was a man with a golden heart. To see him slowly succumb to the interminable sickness—the cancer spitting in the face of all manner of treatments—brought anger bubbling forth in me. Anger at my own impotence; anger at being capable of nothing other than watching on.

I managed to contain it as I walked home. Contain it as I took the stairs up to the topmost floor. Contain it as I entered my flat and locked the door. When I thought I could finally let loose, the anger loosened its grip on me, leaving only sadness. How fickle mourning was. I entered the room lit only by the grey wash of morning light and curled on my bed, forcing myself to come to terms with the cruel, cold fact that Dad would dead. When the cancer had first appeared, the prognosis had been good. Then it had been up in the air. Now, his recovery was impossible.

I lay there for hours. The rucked covers held the smell of neglect. I faced the wall and pushed the thought from my mind. Tasks such as laundry had seemed pointless for weeks now. Knowing that such thoughts were a sign of something wrong provided no motivation to act on them. There I lay.

I blinked when the wall started moving. It rippled like silk in the wind… no, it was the surface of the ocean on a calm day. I watched it through bleary eyes. The wall did not ripple, I realised; it was a trick of the light caused by an unceasing undulation of shadows. I lifted my head. Movement drew my gaze to the window.

It took a few moments to recognise what I saw.

Framed by the flat square of my window, a mass of bulbous jellyfish heads drifted by, their tentacles floating below them as freely as if they had been underwater. They nudged and bumped and slid past each other in a slow pilgrimage across the pane. I watched in slack-jawed wonder. How many of them were there? I blinked. Hard. It was an effort to reconcile logic with what I now saw. It was impossible.

As I looked on, the sun finally found a crack in the clouds. Beams of melted yellow lit up the jellyfish, limning them with pale blues and pink and opal, a kaleidoscopic effect that dazzled my eyes and turned my room into a slow disco. I realised I was smiling. A stupid grin. As I watched the show outside, I realised why: the sight had given me hope. Hope that if the impossible could in fact be possible right now, why couldn’t it be for other things? I had claimed that Dad’s death was certain, but was it? He was still alive, after all, and readying himself for a fresh round of treatment. Right now, nothing was certain.

I watched the jellyfish until the final stragglers drifted by, and then I opened my window wide and leaned out as far as I dared, hearing the shouts of befuddled pedestrians below. I had not realised the true scale of the jellyfish cloud from my window, but as I looked at it now, I realised it was truly gigantic, the mass rising by degrees above the blocky flats and apartments of the city. I hazarded a picture with my phone, leaning out far from the high-storey window to get a good shot. I would need it to prove to Dad I was not lying. And I would need it to prove to myself that strange things can happen in life.


End file.
